Like most other manufacturing industries, China's machine tool industry has flourished and made great strides over the past decade. It has become the world's largest consumer, importer, and producer of machine tools, securing an unparalleled global position.
However, after the brilliance comes the ordinariness; the ebb and flow of life is the true essence of existence. China's machine tool manufacturing industry is undergoing a transformation and upgrading, a new 10- year journey of refinement and metamorphosis.
Crisis and Opportunity in Transformation
Downward pressure is clearly the prevailing sentiment in the machine tool industry right now.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, from January to July 2019 , the cumulative operating revenue of China's machine tool industry decreased by 2.5% year-on-year , and the cumulative total profit decreased by 21.1% year-on-year, with 18.0% of enterprises incurring losses . Meanwhile, data from a survey of key machine tool enterprises by the China Machine Tool & Tool Builders' Association shows that during the same period, the main business revenue of machine tool enterprises decreased by 17.2% year-on-year , total profit decreased by 91.3% , new orders for metalworking machine tools decreased by 41% year-on-year , and outstanding orders decreased by 24.1% year-on-year .
The reasons behind this are multifaceted. There is the pressure of transformation and upgrading of machine tool equipment brought about by changes in the market customer demand structure, as well as the adjustment of the total demand scale of downstream industries. In particular, the decline of important downstream industries of machine tools, such as automobile manufacturing, as well as the decline of mass consumer electronics industries such as white goods and mobile phones, and the downturn of more industries such as motorcycle, internal combustion engine, agricultural machinery and general machinery manufacturing, have directly affected the machine tool industry.
So where are the industry opportunities?
First, exports continued to grow. According to data from China Customs, from January to June 2019 , China's total imports of machine tools amounted to US $ 6.95 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 20.6% , while total exports reached US$ 7.03 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9.2% . This marks the first time since the reform and opening up that China has achieved a trade surplus in machine tools.
Secondly, technological innovation brings new opportunities, with machine tools moving towards higher precision, integration, and intelligence to meet the growing demands of mid-to-high-end manufacturing customers. Machining accuracy, a crucial indicator of machine tool technology, directly impacts product quality and production stability; high-precision machining capabilities and refined processing techniques remain fundamental requirements. Multifunctional integration of machine tools better adapts to the current market demands for single-piece, small-batch, and rapid production, significantly improving processing efficiency and quality. Intelligent machine tools with self-sensing, self-diagnosis, self-adjustment, self-adaptation, and real-time network communication capabilities will become key processing equipment in intelligent production systems, enabling optimized machining.
Third, with the rapid upgrading of demand structure, the ability to quickly supply non-standard customized CNC machine tools has become a crucial factor in gaining future competitiveness. Therefore, for the core CNC component of machine tools, developing customized CNC machine tools quickly and at low cost through a versatile and customizable open CNC system will become one of the important ways to cope with changes in demand structure.
The Innovative Future of CNC Machine Tools
The ability to research and manufacture CNC machine tools, especially high-end CNC machine tools, remains a challenge for Chinese machine tool manufacturers and a core requirement for the future upgrading and transformation of the entire Chinese machine tool industry. Only by possessing such capabilities can China's machine tool industry overcome its current difficulties and seize the opportunities to win in the future.
As the brain of machine tools, the CNC systems of Chinese machine tool manufacturers still largely rely on a few international CNC system providers. More importantly, traditional CNC systems are relatively closed hardware and software platforms, which leads to the following problems:
The existing CNC systems from various brands are incompatible in terms of hardware and software, and lack a unified high-speed network channel for interconnection with other devices. On the one hand, this makes it impossible for machine tool users to guarantee their investment, and the total cost of ownership ( TCO ) is relatively higher than that of open systems. On the other hand, the lack of unified interconnectivity obviously easily creates information silos, which runs counter to the current networking and big data applications.
These CNC systems have fixed functions, and machine tool manufacturers cannot perform secondary development, redefine or expand the system using their own industry experience, or develop customized functions with independent intellectual property rights. This seriously affects the independent innovation and differentiated competition needs of Chinese manufacturers.
Therefore, open CNC systems are redefining the future of CNC machine tools.
The openness provided by standardized hardware and software environments, portability to different hardware platforms and system environments, customizable control panels, scalability of CNC system-related components, and interoperability of different program modules through standardized interfaces are all core advantages brought by open CNC systems.
In this field, the open CNC system architecture of industrial PC + soft CNC + EtherCAT bus provided by the German company Beckhoff has opened up an innovative path for the development of intelligent CNC manufacturing, redefining CNC machine tool technology and providing a powerful catalyst for the transformation of China's machine tool industry.
